*Part five in the series: “Teaching as a Spiritual Path: Soul Work for the Teacher in the New Paradigm.”

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Education draws in a particular kind of person.

Much like nursing, teaching attracts empaths, people who feel deeply, care instinctively, and orient their lives around service.

Many educators arrive with open hearts, porous boundaries, and a sincere desire to help. They are sensitive, emotionally attuned, and often able to sense the needs of others before those needs are spoken.

This same sensitivity, however, often comes with little training in boundaries. Many teachers absorb the feelings of others easily. They overextend. They carry the people-pleaser archetype as a dominant pattern, mistaking self-sacrifice for devotion.

This is one of the ways teaching begins to break you.

In my work with educators over the last two decades, I’ve observed a small constellation of archetypes that consistently show up in the teaching profession.

The Martyr or Victim, who gives endlessly and feels quietly resentful.

The Wounded Mother or Over-Giver, who confuses care with depletion.

The Dictator, who meets their unmet needs through control and power-over dynamics in the classroom.

And the Prostitute, who slowly trades integrity for approval, safety, or survival.

Each of these archetypes has an illuminated expression:

The Warrior, the Grounded Mother, the King, and the Lover.

But here is where teaching breaks you:

Teacher education does not strengthen the illuminated archetypes. It leaves educators operating almost entirely from the shadow.

Teacher education focuses on lesson plans, classroom management, standards, outcomes, and compliance.

It capitalizes on the idealistic narrative of teachers as change agents, here to make a difference, here to serve, here to give.

What it does not teach is the unspoken agreement beneath the profession:

In order to serve, you must give everything of yourself.

Your health.

Your mental well-being.

Your nervous system.

Your creativity.

Your capacity to feel joy without exhaustion.

Teachers are trained to give, but not taught how to remain intact while doing so.

This is the elephant in the room, what I name as the Unspoken Curriculum in this series of articles.

The Unspoken Curriculum teaches educators how to survive in a system that is outdated, patriarchal, hierarchical, and often rooted in fear and control. It teaches compliance without naming it as such. It teaches endurance over truth. It teaches loyalty to the system over loyalty to the self.

It teaches teachers how to teach change inside a system that resists change.

And this contradiction is venom.

Most teachers enter the profession with integrity. With values. With a desire to do what is right for children.

And slowly, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly, they are asked to fracture that integrity.

Lower standards.

Don’t name that concern.

Follow the script.

Pass the child along.

Protect the institution.

Be perfect.

Say “yes” when you should say “no” to preserve harmony.

What we call burnout and exhaustion has an underlying layer that is hard to access when teachers are unable to connect to the sensations of their body. Which is where teachers often navigate, in a nervous system survival response.

This underlying layer is grief. Both collective grief in the field of teaching as well as individual grief from each teacher.

Grief for the self that entered this work believing it was possible to serve without disappearing.

Grief for the gap between what education claims to be and what it actually asks of those inside it.

What has supported me in teaching over the past 25 years is the reckoning that teaching is not just a profession.

It is a relational field.

It is an initiatory path.

And that teaching is a spiritual path.

Teaching brings it all. It brings teachers into daily contact with power, projection, unmet needs, and unhealed wounds, both their own and those of the system they work within.

And no one prepares them for that.

When teaching is framed only as a job, the breaking feels like failure. Because the reality is no one can fulfill this job in the expectation that is projected onto the profession.

But when teaching is understood as a spiritual path, the breaking makes sense. Initiations are here to dismantle false identities within the individual teacher and the collective body of the teacher.

The challenges in teacher education come in that these initiations are not supported. Teachers become initiated without a map, through trauma, collapse, and unmet grief.

What I have come to understand, after more than 25 years inside classrooms and teacher education, is that teaching is not meant to be survived through sacrifice. It is meant to be met through initiation.

When the breaking is unnamed, teachers internalize it as failure. When the grief is unheld, it turns into exhaustion, resentment, or collapse. And when the spiritual nature of the work is denied, teachers are left alone inside a process that is inherently transformational.

My forthcoming book, The Initiated Teacher, was written because I could no longer pretend this truth was peripheral. It names teaching as a spiritual path, not to romanticize it but to restore dignity to what educators are actually living. It offers language for the breaking, maps for the initiatory thresholds teachers inevitably cross, and a way to reclaim integrity without leaving the profession or losing oneself within it. This is not about fixing teachers. It is about preparing them for the depth of what the work already asks.

Teaching breaks you where you were never supported to become whole. But it does not have to break you into silence, illness, or disappearance. When initiation is named, grief is honored, and the inner life of the teacher is finally centered, something else becomes possible. Teaching can become what it was always meant to be: a path of embodied service, sovereignty, and soul.

This is the path of the Initiated Teacher.

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Read part one of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Naming the Pain we’re not Supposed to Feel.

Read part two of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Learning to Die.

Read part three of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Teaching Soul to Soul.

Read part four of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Eros, Spirituality & the Teacher.

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